BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Bible Basics Can We All Make It To Heaven?

And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.(Matthew 16:18 KJV) It would seem that if, according to Christendom's doctrines, 90% or more of mankind will end up in eternal torment that the gates of hell will prevail, and mightily! Do you believe the Bible, or what most churches tell us about the fate of the wicked? If you say, "I believe in the Bible," then you are faced with the question of "which Bible?" You see, as translators have received more and more understanding of the original languages of the Bible, "hell" and it's "eternal" status are rapidly fading right off the pages of most Bible translations, including the conservative ones!

Recently, we received a copy of the Holy Scriptures produced by the Jewish Publication Society. Of course, being the Jewish Bible, it did not contain the New Testament. In reviewing it, we discovered some interesting things. One shocking observation was discovering hundreds of footnotes as the following: Exact meaning of Hebrew uncertain, syntax of Hebrew unclear, the traditional reading madhebah is of unknown meaning, grammar of Hebrew unclear, meaning of first line uncertain, meaning of verse uncertain in part, force of Hebrew uncertain, construction of the verses uncertain, etc.. This was very shocking. Those of us coming from a conservative Christian background are usually told the Bible is inerrant. The Jews were the guardians of the Old Testament who were extremely diligent to preserve the text that not one jot or tittle was added or removed. Nearly all Christian Bibles rely on the Jewish Masoretic Hebrew text for translating the Old Testament into current languages. How was it possible for the translators to produce an "inerrant" Bible, when the "guardians of the so called 'inerrant' Hebrew text", did not know the meaning of many words and passages?

Unfortunately, the problem does not lie with the Jews lack of understanding of their own language, but with a false doctrine perpetuated by fundamentalists for many years. The Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy. This doctrine has caused Christian leaders to have to outright lie to maintain their position. They have to take plain facts and hide them from their followers. Because they have locked themselves into the teaching that the King James Bible is "the inerrant" translation of the "so-called" original texts, they have locked themselves into a position where lying, distorting, and name calling are the only options left to maintain their ground. They say the 66 books of the present King James Bible are inerrant, but they don't tell you it lacks 14 entire books which were in the original King James of 1611. They don't tell you the King James Bible has been changed many times in the last 350 years and there have been thousands of corrections! They don't tell you the King James Bible was never authorized by anyone. They don't tell you the original KJV had a calendar of annual Holy days which all believers were to follow such as: Purification of the virgin Mary, annunciation of our Lady, Innocents day, etc.. They don't tell you the Greek text used by the King James translators produced by Erasmus, a Roman Catholic humanist monk, did not have manuscripts that contained all 27 books of the New Testament, so he borrowed out of the Latin Catholic Vulgate! No, they can't tell you these things because that would be the end of the lie which has kept them in business.

As we browsed through this excellent Old Testament translation, marvelling that these Jewish scholars were not ashamed to tell the world they were not perfect and therefore could not produce an inerrant translation, we noticed something else even more startling than the footnotes. We couldn't find the word "hell," even once! This was incredible! The very foundation of Christianity, the Old Testament, three quarters of the Bible, and the word "hell" could not be found. In searching dozens of English translations of the Old Testament, to our absolute amazement, the word "hell" could not be found in most of the leading translations. Abraham, Moses, David, and all the rest of the peoples of the Old Testament only knew one place where all people went, good or bad . . . Sheol, the grave, the place of the departed.

This information aroused our curiosity. The thought occurred: how many times is the word "hell" used in the Christian Bible. Surely, with as much as is taught about the subject in most present day churches, one would think this word would appear hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times in the Bible. The word "heaven(s)" occurs 603 times in the leading Christian English Bible translation, the New International Version. The New American Standard has the word heaven(s) 635 times. To our absolute amazement, the word "hell" in the New International occurred only 14 times! The New American Standard had it 13 times! What was even more astounding was that, like the Jewish Old Testament, neither of these leading Bibles has the word "hell" in the Old Testament! The creator, according to these top selling Bibles, agreed with the Jewish Old Testament that the concept of the place of eternal torment for the unrighteous could not be found in the first three quarters of the Bible. Adam was not warned of "hell." Abraham never heard of "hell." Moses, who brought the Creator's Law into the world warned that "the wages of sin is death," Sheol, the grave. He never ever warned about being roasted, toasted, and endlessly tortured. David, when chasing after Bathsheba, suffered the consequences of his sin, but eternal torment was not on his mind. How could the Creator be so thoughtless, and not warn millions of people of a fate they did not even know awaited them? Could this be just? Could this be loving?

Having several thousand dollars of Bible research software and dozens of English Bible translations, we wanted to see if these top respected English Bibles (NIV, NASB, etc.) just made a serious mistake or whether we stumbled on to something which should cause us to reevaluate what we have just accepted because we heard it so many times and just assumed was correct. Most of us picture an apple tree as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but you won't find it in any Bible, none of them! Most of us, I am sure, when thinking of the Passover, think of a lamb, but a goat was equally acceptable. Our minds have been doctrinally contaminated by traditions much more than perhaps we are willing to admit.

Of the many English Bible translations we searched, the King James Bible had the most number of cases where we found the word "hell" in the Old Testament. It translated the Hebrew word "Sheol" as "grave" 31 times, "hell" 31 times, and "pit" 3 times. Almost without exception, all the other leading Protestant Bibles didn't have the nerve to do what the King's translators did, that is, take the Hebrew word "Sheol" where everyone went, according to the Old Testament teachings, and divide it into "hell," a place for the unrighteous, and "grave" or "pit," presumably the place for the righteous. They translated this word according to their theology, and not according to the Hebrew. Most of the translations did not have the word "hell" in any part of the Old Testament. The ones that did, have mentioned it only a handfull of times, always from the Hebrew word "Sheol" which they translated the vast majority of times "grave, underworld, etc.." Those translations that use the word "hell" are so inconsistent with it, that it is impossible to determine which Scriptures clearly refers to "hell" and which refers to "grave." Where one translation had "hell," another had "grave." In other words, those translations that tried to put "hell" into the Old Testament couldn't agree with each other as to which verses spoke of "hell" and which spoke of the "grave."

People, if the love of Christ is in your hearts, this should cause you to really look into this. This world needs to be set free of false images and concepts of our wonderful Father. Please meditate on this very thoughtfully and prayerfully. If eternal torment is the penalty for sin and the Creator did not want anyone ending up there, then it should stand to reason that He would make the warning as absolutely clear as He could make it. If He is not a respecter of persons, as He claims in the New Testament, then that warning should be loud and clear to all mankind, past, present, and future. But the fact of the matter is that Adam was never warned, he was warned the penalty would be death, not eternal torment. Thousands upon thousands were born after Adam and they were never warned. Moses came along and gave to Israel His Law, which was binding only to Israel, and it mentioned that the wages of sin was death, not eternal torment. He wrote about blessings and cursing in this lifetime, not of some pending judgment which would set one's course for all eternity. He destroyed Sodom for great sin and promised to restore them one day and give them to Jerusalem as a daughter. (Ezekiel chapter 16) According to the Mosaic Law, the blessings and cursings dealing with the Law dealt with this lifetime, not with eternity. The consequence of breaking Moses Law was cursings in this lifetime, the greatest of which was a shortened life through an early death. Period!